Rene Rodriguez

Leave it to von Trier to conceive an intergalactic sci-fi metaphor for a psychological disorder – and then make it work so astonishingly well.

This is a beautiful movie.

Contains all of the hallmarks of classic genre Spielberg: It shows you things you've never seen before, instills an accompanying sense of awestruck wonder, and delivers long stretches of heightened, delirious excitement that remind you why people started going to the movies in the first place.

White God is the rare sort of movie in the era of computer-generated special effects where you can’t believe your eyes, because what you’re looking at is real.

This poignant, wise and subtle picture -- which, yes, happens to be the best movie of the year -- should be approached with humble expectations. Lee's approach to this delicate material is suffused with melancholy, metaphors and small, telling touches that favor subtlety over exclamation points and rough-hewn simplicity over grandiloquence.

The Lion King is everything you'd expect it to be: utterly charming, dazzling, rapturous entertainment. It's one for the ages. [24 June 1994, p.G4]

Brilliant, suspenseful, absolutely riveting film.

The best teen horror flick ever made, an emotionally involving, sublimely acted tale of an archetypal ugly-duckling loner (Sissy Spacek, who earned an Oscar nomination) who wreaks revenge on her tormentors, with apocalyptic results. [24 Aug 2001, p.21G]

And the animation, ultimately, is what makes Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs worth seeing again on the big screen. Aladdin may have grossed more than $200 million, but even its state-of- the-art, computer-assisted animation can't surpass the detail and fluidity, the denser-than-reality feel, the astonishing palette (check out the red on the poisoned apple) of the film. Watching it, you don't forget it's a cartoon: You relish that it is. What bigger compliment is there than that? [2 July 1993, p.G5]

It’s a cry of despair and soul-shaking desperation, leavened with shades of Dostoyevskyan angst.

That song (Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love), which becomes a sort of mantra to the movie, is the key to understanding what the Coens are after: When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, you better find somebody to love.

Hana-Bi is a film by an artist too creative -- and too talented -- to set limits for himself. He is a rarity among filmmakers nowadays: A genuine original. [17 Apr 1998]

In a larger sense, Adaptation is a movie about the simple act of enjoying life -- of really embracing it -- without constantly worrying about what others think.

A terrific yarn, one so engrossing and surprising that the nature of the story's structure -- each question Jamal gets asked on the show corresponds with a traumatic or momentous moment from his childhood -- never feels like a contrived framing device.

One of the best things about 12 Years a Slave is that McQueen renders all the characters with the same depth and complexity as his protagonist.

Silence feels like a career summation for a filmmaker who has spent his life exploring his faith through his work. Here is a movie about the importance of religion that will move you, regardless of whichever God you worship — or don’t.

What makes it the best movie of the year -- is its insight into human behavior.

This is the sort of small, intimate drama about unpleasant subject matter Hollywood rarely deals with, but Haneke isn't worried about turning off his audience, because death is something everyone has in common. It fascinates us, the way it also scares us.

Here is a celebration of the artistic drive that is also a daring feat of showmanship, as technically accomplished in its own way as “Mad Max Fury Road” or “The Revenant."

Project X is an astounding, superlative movie about adolescence - a brutal, unapologetic comedy about the fantasy every high school kid carries around in his head about being popular and cool and beloved.

Jeanne Dielman is not for all tastes. But for those with the necessary patience, it is a game-changing masterpiece. [11 Sep 2009, p.G18]

Rousing, exhilarating entertainment.

The movie is quiet and serene, but it stirs and inspires and amuses. In the small details of an ordinary life, Jarmusch finds wells of beauty and empathy. The movie is an exploration of the deep pleasures of creativity.

This is the most vibrant, exciting and invigorating movie-movie of the year.

Brave has a manic, almost daffy energy and sense of humor.

Up in the Air is also optimistic about the perpetual themes that preoccupy so many movies that endure the test of time: Life is better with company. And everybody needs a co-pilot.

The film is precious and adorable, but it isn't naïve, and the movie breathes so deep that Anderson even gets a real performance out of Willis (this is his best work in years).

In The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer pulls off the impossible: He confronts great, incomprehensible evil and puts a human face on it.

Like every war before it, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has generated its share of movies. But The Hurt Locker is the first of them that can properly be called a masterpiece.

The movie, shot in lovely, grainy 16mm by cinematographer Ed Lachman, is so elegantly staged you can practically smell the characters’ perfume. Haynes’ direction is methodical and precise without being fussy or oppressive. Every detail has been weighed and considered.

Although it is technically a sequel, Before Sunset stands perfectly well on its own. In fact, the new movie plays better if you haven't seen the original for a while, so its details have grown appropriately fuzzy.

A visually thrilling experience.

The Straight Story truly is one from the heart, and it is wonderful.

Ever the satirist, Payne mines humor from his characters, be it Randall's cockeyed pyramid-scheme ideas or the banality of a ridiculous wedding toast.

Feels like a miracle, a movie that exceeds even the most formidable expectations without straying from its singular path. All hail this King.

Basterds isn't so revolutionary or so finely crafted as "Pulp Fiction" was, but it crackles with the same energy and imagination and chutzpah.

Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the Coens’ smallest movies — this one doesn't have the broad appeal of "True Grit" or "No Country For Old Men" — but like Llewyn’s music, it comes from the heart and it is deeply felt. It is also one of their best.

The movie itself is a nominee for Best Animated Feature, and it's good enough to pull a surprise upset over the beloved Finding Nemo. It's a mad masterpiece.

But this is also his funniest, nimblest picture: There are long stretches in it that could pass for a comedy.

The movie has such a profound and compassionate understanding of human behavior, family ties and the way ordinary people respond when they're forced into a moral quandary, I can't imagine anyone not being transfixed by it.

Sometimes, the simplest, smallest things require the greatest courage. Moonlight is Miami’s first bonafide movie masterpiece.

It's the filmmakers' refusal to sugarcoat their tale's darker subtexts that makes Finding Nemo such a resounding piece of storytelling.

Spotlight is simply a great story exceedingly well told, through characters whose fingers are perpetually stained with ink.

One of the most searing experiences to be had at the movies this year.

A thoughtful, audacious meditation on love and relationships that finds a group of wildly disparate talents clicking together in perfect unison.

Intentionally designed to rile as much as entertain.

A model of pitch and modulation and craft. For two hours, the Coens hold you in their grip so tightly that for long stretches it feels a little hard to breathe.

There isn't a moment in the movie where you don't feel Spielberg's passion, and this time, the film is worthy of his enthusiasm. It's a knockout.

This is not the sort of movie you can just leave behind in the theater. And like any true finale to a trilogy, the picture doesn't work nearly as well if you haven't seen the previous two installments: It's not designed to stand alone, and it pays off all that has come before with an exuberant, thrilling high.

If it had been a drama, The Wolf of Wall Street might have been unwatchable: There’s simply too much of everything. But Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire) hit on the genius idea to turn the story into a riotous comedy, one that keeps topping itself everytime you think it can’t possibly get crazier.

Movies that demand to be seen by everyone -- not only for their entertainment value, but for what they say -- are precious rarities. Spike Lee's Get On the Bus is one of those films. You walk out of it feeling the world's axis has tilted ever so slightly: No matter who you are, or what your perspective was going in, the movie will make you look at last year's Million Man March -- and all of black America -- through different eyes. [16 Oct 1996, p.1D]

One of the many pleasures of this beautifully composed, measured movie is how it reminds you of the power of pure storytelling -- an art that's too often overlooked in contemporary films in the rush for sensation and excitement.

Has the feel of an instant classic, a melodrama with an exacting precision and a visceral, propulsive energy.

Delivers the heady, rib-tickling rush of an action picture, and it gradually builds to an emotional wallop that blindsides you.

The movie is an absolute triumph of culturally relevant filmmaking – a film that will thrill and fascinate sport junkies and non-fans alike. If you like baseball, you will love this movie. If you hate baseball, you will still love this movie.

Part of the accomplishment of Carlos is the sheer accumulation of detail the movie amasses, and the longer running time gives you a deeper sense of the terrorist lifestyle, and when and why Ilich gradually succumbed to ego and self-glorification without realizing it.

The movie gives you what you think you want, and then gives you some more, and just when you think things can't get any worse, Haneke swoops in and smashes the wall between fiction and reality, turning the viewer into a direct accomplice to what's transpiring onscreen. It is an astonishing film, sure to be controversial, and quite simply unforgettable. [30 Jan. 1998, p.6G]

A rich, marvelous movie -- the kind that enchants on so many different levels, it leaves you feeling giddy.

Her argues that sometimes, crazy can be wonderful.

The good news is you’re feeling stuff, you know? And you’ve got to hold on to that. You get older, and you don’t feel as much, your skin gets tough.” This remarkable, wonderful movie helps you remember.

Makes the Columbine shootings seem both abstract yet more painful and vivid. It also gets you excited all over again about the things movies can do.

Seydoux says that when the film was completed and released shortly after the end of the war, it became a symbol of freedom.

It's a beautiful, strange tone poem about childhood and innocence, set in a strange but still recognizable world where the polar ice caps are melting, crayfish shacks float down rivers and enormous aurochs, an extinct breed of bison, are sloughing their way toward our tiny, adorable narrator.

The fact that that character happens to be so repellent -- and yet so endlessly fascinating -- is one of the film's many strokes of genius.

With Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller delivers the sort of jumbo-sized entertainment that makes you spontaneously break out in appreciative laughter: The breadth of his imagination and showmanship makes you giddy.

It leaves you feeling exhilarated at the invigorating power a well-told story, no matter its subject, can have. If you like Harry Potter, you will love this movie. If you don't like Harry Potter, you will still love this movie.

This remarkable, continually surprising documentary turns out to be something far richer and more complex, closer in spirit to "Crumb," another devastating film about a family's gradual self-destruction.

A masterpiece of pop filmmaking -- a fantastic, exuberant entertainment that manages to be both sleek and substantial without being patronizing.

Seeing the Earth from the point of view these men saw it -- ''like a jewel hung in the blackness'' -- tends to put things in perspective.

A worthy and delirious final chapter to this hallowed animation franchise.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an example of Disney animators at the very top of their craft -- and at their most daring. [21 June 1996, p.5G]

The movie is a furious, in-your-face whirlwind of emotions, but it’s never tiresome or bellicose, and its raucous, messy energy is invigorating.

Smashing, supremely engrossing picture.

Control Room may not seem all that compelling 10 years down the road. But right now, at this very moment, it is essential, imperative viewing.

The Muppets may have been born out of a desire to revive a dormant franchise that was once a cash cow, but there isn't a single beat in the film that feels crass or opportunistic. This one is from the heart.

It takes some exceptionally intelligent and witty people to make a dumb comedy this funny and perceptive: Borat may be offensive (to some), infantile, low-brow or even just a stunt, but you won't hate yourself in the morning for loving it.

The movie is absolutely hilarious, a satire as brisk and fleet as a farce and as profane as a convention of Tony Montana impersonators.

The movie, engrossing as it is intentionally horrifying, is capped by a last-minute revelation that brings the story to a haunting, powerful close.

As this intimate, beautifully observed film unfolds, you realize that the story's themes -- the nature of love, the role of sex in relationships and the ways in which we learn to make peace with our guilty consciences -- are relevant no matter what age you happen to be.

Maya is as consumed with finding bin Laden as Jake Gyllenhaal was obsessed with finding a serial killer in "Zodiac," only he was doing it as a hobby.

If The Pianist isn't quite as devastating as "Schindler's List" -- the movie with which all other Holocaust movies must be compared -- it's because Polanski isn't interested in an expansive view of the war.

But this smart, genuinely creepy movie also feels <I>real</I>, which is why its horrors hit so hard. Fans of the scary stuff, run, don't walk.

Instead of a history lesson, Selma plays like suspenseful, absorbing drama.

Deals with themes Eastwood has often explored before, but never so delicately or with as much sad wisdom: The way in which our past haunts our present, the lasting repercussions of violence and the cruel inexorability of fate.

Without a hint of sanctimony, it is a love story as much about soul as heart.

A searing, heartbreaking metaphor for the futility of war.

Match Point begins to recall Hitchcock as it unfolds, although it wouldn't be right to call it a thriller. This is still very much a Woody Allen movie, populated by upper-class characters who chatter about literature and fine art, frequent museums and designer boutiques and accidentally run into each other on the street with uncanny regularity.

One frenetic movie that doesn't know when to quit -- and leaves you wishing it could go on forever.

A soaring, exhilarating fantasy grounded in earthy emotion, Crouching Tiger more than lives up to the hype.

Easily the most searing movie-going experience of the year.

This playful, immensely entertaining movie knows that art is in the eye of the beholder.

Although it is structured like a thriller, and its plot dominated by Benjamin's detective work, The Secret in Their Eyes is really a cautionary tale about the consequences of a life of too much apprehension and propriety.

Those rigorously moral and humanistic underpinnings give 28 Weeks Later a kind of power that 100 Saws and Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes could never achieve.

Like Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," Martha Marcy May Marlene gradually places us inside the mind of a woman who just might be insane, and in its audacious, terrifying final scene, the movie traps us there in perpetuity, refusing to provide the viewer with a way out. This time, the horror follows you home - no exit, no escape.

The fact that the last line of dialogue is spoken five minutes before the end credits roll is telling: Words matter little in a movie that favors seeing and feeling above all else. It’s a work of pure, furious sensation.

But Romeo Is Bleeding ultimately belongs to Olin. When she and Oldman finally begin to go at it, no holds barred, in the last 20 minutes, the film becomes an audacious free-for-all, a bloody battle of the sexes that reaches a frantic fever pitch that will leave you giddy. It is film noir at its funniest -- and darkest. [4 Feb 1994, p.5]

Mendes' approach to action is classical and elegant - no manic editing and blurry unintelligible images here - but what makes the movie truly special is the attention he gives his actors.

One of the most rewarding and engaging movies of the year. Don't miss it.